Robot FEDOR

Android Skybot F-850

“Admiring our Earth from the porthole of Soyuz-MS14 at the end of the working day. She is beautiful. Studying and exploring space makes people smarter and makes them work together. And we, machines made by humans, are ready to help our creators go further.”

Russia’s foreign minister has claimed an “Anglo-Saxon” group of states is dictating anti-doping policies to the world. Current anti-doping rules follow the World Anti-Doping Code first introduced in 1999 in Switzerland, to which 660 sports organizations, including Russia’s, are signatories.

The Russian Foreign Ministry claim that Baltnews.lv is “independent” and a non-state-controlled media outlet is false. The news portal is part of the Russian government-owned media conglomerate MIA Rossiya Segodnya.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Russian opposition figure

“Worse of all, the idea of organizing racial rallies to cause the U.S.A. to collapse is not an isolated case of an acute psychotic break-down of some mentally ill staffer. In the same letter, Prigozhin’s staffers are bragging about their participation in the wars in eastern Ukraine, in Syria. They are also building plans to ‘assist in training national security forces’ in such countries as Qatar, Sudan, CAR, Chad, Madagascar, as well as ‘implementation of joint projects with Congo, South Sudan, Ethiopia.’ And that, as we know, are not just plans but reality.”

The U.S. Justice Department indictment and the data on Russian advertisements on Facebook released to the U.S. Congress allege that Yevgeny Prigozhin and companies controlled by him have been conspiring to defraud the U.S., including by aggravating social divisions.

The report by the special counsel on Russian interference in the 2016 election does contain evidence that Russia interfered in the election in several ways. However, much of the evidence establishing interference came in earlier indictments by Mueller and the U.S. Intelligence Community’s reports.

Margarita Simonyan

Managing editor of RT and Rossiya Segodnya

“Kindly Ecuador, which today surrendered Assange to the police, demanded that the British not extradite him to the country where he faces death penalty – i.e. the States. A few years ago Assange told me the UK will extradite him to Sweden and [from] Sweden to the U.S. Precisely where he is under the threat of the death penalty.”

Russian state media managing editor's claim is baseless: at this point, the maximum punishment for the charges brought against Assange in the U.S. is five years imprisonment. Besides, in the U.S. justice system, a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Apart from the rhetoric of a former CIA director, the U.S. Justice Department confirmed in writing that Snowden never faced capital punishment. Lavrov falsely connects the Magnitsky Act to the Snowden affair.

Rick Sanchez, RT America host

RT America host

“The demonization of Russia is the engine that drives, if nothing else, our weapons industry. Using a complicit media, the arms industry makes billions and billions of dollars simply convincing us, and other countries all over the world, that they need protection from Russia… Whether Russia really poses a threat or not doesn’t really matter. That’s the real story here, that’s the real takeaway from the Mueller report.”

Independent analyses show that the global arms trade increased steadily over 2008-2018. During the period of the Mueller investigation, the U.S. share in the global weapons transfer increased by less than one percent.

Despite attempts at assuring the Russian public that the draft law on the Digital Economy National Program is not intended to “cut off” Russia from the world, critics fear Russia’s own “Great Firewall” is in the offing.

Sputnik cried “censorship” after Facebook removed 364 Facebook pages and accounts for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” But while Sputnik charged the pages were removed for their politically-motivated content, Facebook says it was a matter of “misrepresentations of their identities.”

WADA’s president did not say he was disappointed “at the organization’s failure.” On the contrary, he was speaking of Russia’s non-compliance with WADA demands. The organization’s inspectors did not “fail to access” Moscow laboratory data, but were denied access by Russian authorities.